Microsoft Drops ‘Aero Glass’ User Interface in Windows 8

Fans of Microsoft’s Aero desktop experience will have to prepare for a life without translucent windows in Windows 8. Buried deep within a novel-length blog post, the company announced on Friday that it’s killing the Aero UI in the final release of Windows 8.

Microsoft first shipped Aero Glass when it launched Microsoft Vista in 2006. It featured a glass-like design for window borders, taskbars, and other surfaces in the OS. According to Microsoft, Aero was designed to make the Windows experience more visually appealing, while also drawing user attention to the content within a window or program.

But now, according to Jensen Harris, the Director of Program Management for the Windows User Experience, the Aero look is outdated.

“This style of simulating faux-realistic materials (such as glass or aluminum) on the screen looks dated and cheesy now, but at the time, it was very much en vogue,” Harris writes in the blog post titled ‘Creating the Windows 8 User Experience.’

The Windows 8 team will replace the Aero UI with what it describes as a “clean and crisp” look more in line with its new tile-based Metro UI. In Windows 8, interface windows will no longer feature reflections or shadows. What’s more, corners will be squared off, and surfaces will look flatter. Users will get white as the default windows color, for a “modern” aesthetic.

According to Harris, the Windows 8 team took several things into consideration before deciding on the Windows 8 desktop UI. For one, they wanted to maintain the same colors of Windows 7, in order to avoid compatibility problems for desktop programs. So don’t expect much color-matching between the white text on color in Metro, and the dark text on white in Windows 8 desktop.

The team also wanted to keep the Windows 8 desktop experience similar to the Windows 7 experience.

“We made a conscious effort to relate the visual appearance of the Windows 8 desktop to the visual appearance of the familiar Windows 7 desktop,” Harris wrote. “This helps people who want to predominantly use the desktop feel comfortable and immediately at home in the new environment.”

And Harris points out that the goal behind Aero — to draw attention to a program’s content rather than “chrome” (i.e., title bars, decorative borders, etc.) — remains in the Windows 8 desktop experience.

But others aren’t so happy about the change and think that Microsoft is ditching Aero for more specific reasons. Paul Thurrott, over at his blog Supersite for Windows, argues that Microsoft is getting rid of Aero to save battery life.

“Aero, with all its glassy, translucent goodness, is bad for battery life. Metro, meanwhile, which is flat, dull, not transparent, and only full screen, is very good for battery life. It’s predictable,” he writes.

And battery life matters much more to the on-the-go tablet or laptop user, not the always-plugged-in desktop user. According to Thurrot, Microsoft no longer cares about its traditional desktop user base and has ditched Aero in order to cater to a “mythical” tablet user.

Microsoft is scheduled to make a Windows 8 Release Preview — a nearly finished product — available to the public in the first week of June. But you won’t see much of the desktop design changes then. Harris says that most of the new look won’t be publicly visible until the final version of Windows 8.